“Restless”

BurakaSomSistema are speaking your language. Black Diamond, the Lisbon-based electronic group's first full-fledged album, would probably make sense to anyone hearing it at a party almost anywhere in the world. But the lyrics, M.I.A. cameo aside, are in Portuguese, likely limiting its appeal. And the critical discourse around the album too easily gets bogged down in genre names that some might still mistake for names of exotic diseases. Did I mention the vacation where I caught a raging case of baile funk?

But just as millions of stoner-comedy fans didn't need to know the first thing about Maya Arulpragasam to get turned onto "Paper Planes", you don't need professional experience differentiating between kwaito and soca in order to shake your ass off to these guys. And their take on kuduro, a housey Angolan dance strain, should become even more widely understood with "Restless". Yeah, those pitch-shifted vocals are in English-- should he stay or should he go, etc.-- and they'd sound great in whatever car commercial slots Moby would've claimed a decade ago. While I wouldn't peg the shuffling rhythm for something European, the day-glosynth stabs are straight out of early 1990s rave. "I feel restless," a voice repeats. All the more reason to get that body moving.